While researching my previous Lede project, I discovered that in recent years, the most common animal-related call to 311 in New York City was to report a dead animal. Dead animal calls go to the Department of Sanitation, unless they are inside a park. And it turns out the department gets a lot of calls about raccoons. Raccoons were the second most commonly reported dead animal, after cats. But unlike cats, every reported raccoon had to be a wild animal.

There were nearly 3,700 reported dead raccoons between September 2021 and June 2024. That's a lot of dead raccoons.

Just how many raccoons live in this city anyway?

There's no official count, though one expert estimated 100 raccoons per square mile in the city back in 2016.

Day to day, most New Yorkers aren't that likely to interact with raccoons, who generally don't confront humans and prefer to scavenge garbage at night. When an adult sees a dead raccoon, they're likely to avoid it, and at most call 311 to get it removed by the city.

But children are different. They are curious, and sometimes like to poke dead animals with sticks. How likely is it that a New York City child has played with a dead raccoon? We can't know precisely, but we can examine how close reported dead raccoons were to the city's elementary schools. So that's what I did.

There are 824 public elementary schools in New York City.

And there have been 3,754 dead raccoons reported to the Department of Sanitation since September 2021.

The dead raccoon aren't clustered around parks,

or around subway lines and stations.

They're all over the city, though there are less of them in midtown and lower Manhattan.

But I wanted to know how many of these dead raccoons were in a child's walking distance of their elementary school?

A class of kindergarteners (the smallest, and so likely slowest elementary-schoolers) walks at a speed of about 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) per hour, and could walk roughly 677 meters (or .4 miles) in 10 minutes.

Using New York City's map of walkable streets (excluding things like highways), I mapped the potential 10-minute walk-zone of a kindergartener around each elementary school, then calculated how many dead raccoons were reported within each school's zone. The redder the zone, the more reports. Grey zones had zero reports.

81 percent had at least one reported dead raccoon. 11.3 percent had more than 10.

Four had more than 30 reported dead raccoons in the less than 4-year period.

Many of these reported raccoons were quite close to schools. When I reduced the walking distance to a 5-minute walk, 40 percent still had at least one dead raccoon within its walk-zone, though just 3.2 percent had at least six.

The schools with the highest number of reported dead raccoons, now eight or nine each, had entirely changed.

But here's the thing, sometimes the Department of Sanitation can't find the reported dead raccoon. People may have mistakenly thought they saw a dead raccoon, or provided the wrong location, or a person (or animal) may have already removed the raccoon by the time city workers arrive.

Determining the precise portion of real and false dead raccoon reports is not possible, but for an estimated 42 percent, the Department of Sanitation "investigated this complaint and found no condition at the location," according to the data.

That reduces the number of schools with more than 10 raccoon reports within a 10 min walk from 93 to 27. And makes the highest number of dead raccoons recorded 24, down from 36.

The neighborhoods with the most schools that had at least 10 dead raccoons within a child's walking distance were all in Brooklyn, Staten Island and Queens.

But it was a different set of neighborhoods, in Brooklyn and Queens, that had the most schools when it came to a high number of reports of dead raccoons (at least 10 per school).

Are the children in those neighborhoods more likely to have played with a dead raccoon? Perhaps. Or perhaps their parents are more likely to make false raccoon reports.

The good news is, despite all the dead raccoons, just nine raccoons tested positive for rabies across all five boroughs last year, according to the city. And the Health Department began a "racc-ination" campaign in October, to innoculate raccoons against rabies.

So child proximity to dead raccoons may not need to be high on the list of parental safety concerns right now.

After all, New York City hasn't had a major raccoon rabies outbreak since 2010. Data about how close those raccoons were to schools was uanvailable at the time of publication.